Atlas Shrugged

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present."
"Nonsense! It's much simpler than it looks. There's a pass to the east where there's an easier grade and
softer stone, I watched it on the way up, it wouldn't take so many curves, three miles of rail or less would
do it."
She was pointing east, she did not notice the intensity with which the two men were watching her face.
"Just a narrow-gauge track is all you’ll need . . . like the first railroads . . . that's where the first railroads
started—at mines, only they were coal mines. . . . Look, do you see that ridge? There's plenty of
clearance for a three-foot gauge, you wouldn't need to do any blasting or widening. Do you see where
there's a slow rise for a stretch of almost half a mile? That would be no worse than a four per cent grade,
any engine could manage it." She was speaking with a swift, bright certainty, conscious of nothing but the
joy of performing her natural function in her natural world where nothing could take precedence over the
act of offering a solution to a problem. "The road will pay for itself within three years. I think, at a rough
glance, that the costliest part of the job will be a couple of steel trestles—and there's one spot where I
might have to blast a tunnel, but it's only for a hundred feet or less. I'll need a steel trestle to throw the
track across that gorge and bring it here, but it's not as hard as it looks—let me show you, have you got
a piece of paper?"
She did not notice with what speed Galt produced a notebook and a pencil and thrust them into her
hands—she seized them, as if she expected them to be there, as if she were giving orders on a
construction site where details of this kind were not to delay her.
"Let me give you a rough idea of what I mean. If we drive diagonal piles into the rock"—she was
sketching rapidly—"the actual steel span would be only six hundred feet long—it would cut off this last
half mile of your corkscrew turns—I could have the rail laid in three months and—"
She stopped. When she looked up at their faces, the fire had gone out of hers. She crumpled her sketch
and flung it aside into the red dust of the gravel. "Oh, what for?" she cried, the despair breaking out for
the first time. "To build three miles of railroad and abandon a transcontinental system!"
The two men were looking at her, she saw no reproach in their faces, only a look of understanding
which was almost compassion.
"I'm sorry," she said quietly, dropping her eyes.
"If you change your mind," said Francisco, "I'll hire you on the spot-—or Midas will give you a loan in
five minutes to finance that railroad, if you want to own it yourself."
She shook her head. "I can't . . ." she whispered, "not yet . . ."
She raised her eyes, knowing that they knew the nature of her despair and that it was useless to hide her
struggle. "I've tried it once," she said. "I've tried to give it up . . . I know what it will mean . . .
I'll think of it with every crosstie I'll see laid here, with every spike driven . . . I'll think of that other tunnel
and . . . and of Nat Taggart's bridge. . . . Oh, if only I didn't have to hear about it! If only I could stay
here and never know what they're doing to the railroad, and never learn when it goes!"
"You'll have to hear about it," said Galt; it was that ruthless tone, peculiarly his, which sounded
implacable by being simple, devoid of any emotional value, save the quality of respect for facts. "You'll